Abstract
The year 2016 was reported as an annus horribilis for all sorts of reasons, but one which slipped quietly away from media attention by its end was the worldwide increase in anti-Semitic incidents. In the UK, the prevalence of anti-Semitic attitudes in the Labour Party was widely reported over summer, at the same time as the publication of an 11% increase in attacks on Jewish people in the first half of the year. By its end, a considerable rise in such behaviour, particularly in the USA and Europe, was marked by Jewish media outlets but few others. Those responsible for such acts, judging by the words of their graffiti and even on occasion their public rhetoric, are largely white supremacists and Nazi apologists. Sympathetic political organisations and parties in both America and Europe today proclaim a desire to return their respective countries to what they understand as “Christian values” against a tide of foreign religion, particularly Islam—an irony given that much of the anti-Semitic propaganda they cite is equally propagated by fundamentalist Muslims. Nonetheless, you may hear the rhetoric even in liberal church pulpits and around middle class dining tables about the need to resist such ‘legalistic’ religions as Judaism and Islam, especially when they start demanding their own private courts of law, and how different they are from the liberating creed of Christianity on which Western secularism is founded.
St Thomas Aquinas pithily summarised Patristic theology in his epigram, ‘grace does not destroy nature but perfects it’. The same might be said of the Christian relationship to the ancient Jewish Law: the Law which Matthew after all had Our Lord proclaim that he came not to abolish but to fulfil (Mt 5:17). In a passage unique to Matthew’s gospel (Mt 16:13–20), Peter is proclaimed as rock on which to build the Church, but importantly, this rock is not some new stone. Jesus draws on Jewish understanding of the Scriptures to show that the Law is to be built on, not built over.
It is helpful here to be aware of Matthew’s intended audience. This evangelist is reputedly the most Jewish-oriented of the four, and the pun Jesus makes on Peter’s name supports this conviction. Bear in mind that Our Lord almost never refers to Peter by this name, favouring his Jewish name, Simon (it was common then for Jews to take a Greek name, as it is for many expatriate Chinese to take western names today). Here, then, he is making a point, but a point which does not quite work in the gospeller’s Greek. Peter in Greek is ‘Petros’, and stone is ‘petra’, a feminine word which could not be applied to a man, so the pun falls rather flat. However, in the native Aramaic which Jesus and his followers spoke, there would have been only one word for both, namely “Cephas”. This, and the fact that Matthew considered the exchange worth reporting despite its absence in Mark, makes it likely that Jesus did say these very words, and words which would have little resonance with Greek-speaking gentiles, but plenty with Aramaic-speaking Jews. It would also bolster those Jewish Christians somewhat to hear of Peter’s precedence, in the face of Paul’s leadership of the gentile churches—a reason why this episode might not have made it into Mark’s gospel, written for those communities. The point is, though, that this passage of Matthew was written with Jewish hearers in mind and has a particular resonance with them.
Let us consider then what that resonance might be. First, we should understand that in Old Testament texts, ‘build’ does not mean (as we commonly imagine) ‘build anew’, but ‘build up’ as against ‘knocking down’. So, when Jesus says that he will build his church on Peter, we are not to imagine a gleaming new edifice. Nor should we imagine Peter the ‘rock’ as a monolith or foundation stone. Look back to Isaiah in particular, and you will find quite a different metaphor, as the prophet exhorts those who seek the Lord to ‘look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug’ (Isa 51:1). Jesus’ words also take us back to Isaiah 22, in which the Lord gives the key of David to Eliakim ben Hilkiah to rule over the Jews who have ‘carved habitations’ for themselves in the rock of Jerusalem. Moses, too, strikes not a rock but bedrock in the wilderness, to bring forth the stream of living water with which Jesus elsewhere identifies himself. The idea of rock for Matthew’s Jewish audience is of foundational bedrock, redolent of Jerusalem and giving a sense of stability and permanence, not novelty.
According to ancient rabbinic sources, Peter’s designation as rock also gives him continuity with the Old Testament Patriarchs, especially Abraham: so it is that Peter can rightly be called a patriarch of the Church, a commission which St Cyprian maintained he shared with all the apostles (On the Unity of the Church, 4). This could lead us to the vexing question of the claim for the priority of the Pope, as successor of Peter in Rome, among the bishops of the Holy Catholic Church. The answer to that question cannot, however, rest on this passage alone, as we discover when we consider what qualifies Peter as ‘rock’ in the first place: for Our Lord calls him this only in response to Peter’s own proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah. Peter’s proclamation itself, Jesus says, is the result of divine revelation, from his ‘Father in heaven’ (Mt 16.17). In short, Peter’s equivalence to the Patriarchs is the fruit of their shared faith in God, and that faith is the bedrock in which Peter and all Christians find our foundation.
If faith is a rock, then it cannot be something nebulous, but is rather possessed of defined characteristics, which brings us back to definition of the faith in the Law; and note that when Jesus talks about St Peter’s keys, he is using legal terminology. In ancient rabbinical jurisprudence, to ‘bind’ meant to proclaim something forbidden by the Law, and to ‘loose’ to proclaim it permitted. These are words of legal interpretation and proclamation. What is pronounced in the earthly court is endorsed in the heavenly, but the rabbinical court has no authority to supplant or augment the Law of Moses. Likewise, Jesus gives Peter and the Church no authority for legal innovation of any kind, only of proclamation.
But if our narrative so far has been one of continuity between the faith of the Patriarchs and the foundation of the Church, it is here that paths begin to diverge. For whilst Jesus certainly does not destroy or replace the nature of the Law, by the grace of the Holy Spirit living in him, he radically transforms it. The stumbling block for the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time was that, in Matthew’s account especially, he constantly puts himself at the centre of the Law. In breaking the Sabbath, he proclaims himself its Lord; in inflammatory statements against the honour due to parents, he proclaims himself the Son of God; in the Sermon on the Mount, he demands more even than the Law demands and stands in the place of God. Matthew makes Jesus the law, a law which Christians understand as lived out especially in his death and resurrection.
Those who make any claim on Christian ‘values’ might look more carefully at what Christ himself did with the values of his own age: the elenctic way in which he stretched even the most foundational commandments to breaking point, pierced through them to the hidden unitive essence of the Law, and ultimately lived that essential Law out through his own piercing upon the Cross. Any interpretation of the law written in the heart of Jesus Christ which exhorts abuse or violence is an innovation and transgression. Rather, those who claim the Cross need to see in the great old rock of the Jewish Law our common foundations, and to commit in love to building up together rather than knocking down, so that all God’s people may find a dwelling place carved for them in the New Jerusalem when it comes.